A Show of Force

by Ryk Brown

Sergeant Weatherly’s eyes squeezed together again for a moment, then a look of resolve came over his face as he again looked her in the eyes. “You’d better go, sir.”

  Jessica looked down for a moment, unable to look the sergeant in the eye. Finally, she looked at him again, placing her hands on either side of his head. “You’re a hell of a fucking marine, Jerry.”

  Sergeant Weatherly grabbed her wrist. “Good luck, Jess.”

  Without another word, Jessica let go of the sergeant and rose up and out of the sub. Once clear, she spun around, closed the hatch, and locked it, sealing the sergeant inside. She moved aft, grabbed her gear bag, and secured it to her chest before closing the door to the gear compartment. She turned and looked at Naralena. Behind her dive mask, she too had tears streaming down her face, having heard the entire exchange over the underwater comms.

  “Jess, isn’t there anything…”

  “Eyes on me,” Jessica ordered calmly, pointing at her face mask as she ignored Naralena’s plea. “We stay along the bottom and swim parallel to shore until we’re down to about an hour of air, then we head in and hope we find a safe place to exit the water without being noticed. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir,” Naralena acknowledged, her eyes locked on Jessica’s.

  “I know this sucks, Avakian,” Jessica admitted, “but you know the stakes.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Keep up, and don’t lose sight of me, understood?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Without another word, Jessica pulled out her remote, checked her bearing, and pivoted toward the shore. She then turned ninety degrees to her right, and began swimming away from the jump sub.

  Naralena touched the side of the sub and whispered. “Goodbye, Jerome.”

  Jessica swam at a steady pace, knowing that they might have to swim for quite some time before they found a spot to covertly exit the lake. She glanced behind her every so often to make sure that Naralena was keeping up. It took them less than a minute to clear the murky water that surrounded their impact sight, and within a few more minutes, they were nearing a safe range from the jump sub. A hundred names ran through her mind as she swam. Someone had gone to great lengths to deliver a working jump drive to the Jung, and she was determined to find out who. She was determined to keep her promise to Sergeant Jerome Weatherly.

  Still looking straight ahead, and still swimming at a steady pace, Jessica punched in the code on the remote, and then pushed the destruct button. A confirmation signal flashed, and the track back to the jump sub disappeared from her screen. A second later, they heard a muffled explosion and felt a strong surge of water from behind them.

  Jessica did not look back. She just kept swimming… And kept running names through her head.

  * * *

  Vladimir stood beside the Aurora’s tactical station, staring at the main view screen that wrapped around the front half of the Aurora’s bridge. The image of the Karuzara asteroid filled the screen, with the Earth stretching across the bottom edge of the screen from port to starboard.

  “Captain on the bridge!” the guard at the entrance announced as Nathan came out of his ready room and headed forward.

  “What are you doing up here?” Nathan asked as he walked to the middle of the bridge and stepped up next to Vladimir.

  Vladimir turned his attention away from the Aurora’s main view screen for a brief moment, turning toward Nathan. “I have never seen the Karuzara asteroid,” he replied. He pointed at the main view screen. “Not like this.” He noticed something moving across the face of the massive asteroid base. “Is that the Celestia?”

  “She’s going in to make dry dock.”

  Vladimir looked at Nathan again, a look of mild surprise on his face. “They finished it already?”

  “Blew out the walls between the caverns on the way out, then sealed it up and installed the doors on the way back,” Nathan explained. “They still have a lot of work to do to finish it, but it will serve its purpose well enough for now.”

  “Where did they get the doors?” Vladimir wondered.

  “From what was left of the damaged doors on the main tunnels. Needless to say, the main cavern will no longer be pressurized.”

  “Just as well,” Vladimir said. “It was a waste of resources to pressurize an area that large.”

  “Yes, well, in the end, the decision was due to resources, or lack thereof,” Nathan told him. “Better a dry dock for one ship, than none. Are your people ready to receive the Celestia’s cores?”

  “We will be by the time they are pulled,” Vladimir promised.

  “How long will it take to get them installed?”

  “With both crews working around the clock, we should be able to have them online within the week.”

  “How about five days,” Nathan replied. “I’d prefer to have full power again, before we hit Pylius.”

  Vladimir looked at Nathan again. “You do not care how little sleep I get, do you?”

  “Not really,” Nathan replied with a smile.

  “I suspected as much.” Vladimir looked at the screen again, just as the Celestia disappeared beneath the overhang that masked the entrance from the trench along the lower half of the Karuzara base into the main entrance tunnel. “How long until she is in port?”

  “They should be hard docked, pressurized, and powered down in a few hours,” Nathan replied. “We’ll be going in just as soon as she’s clear of the main cavern… say, about an hour from now.”

  “Then we have time to eat.” Vladimir suggested.

  “You don’t want to wait for Cameron?”

  Vladimir chuckled. “She will only criticize our food and try to get us to eat vegetables instead.”

  * * *

  Commander Telles gazed out the open side of the Kalibri airship as it flew over the compound. Below him were rows upon rows of men, one thousand of them, awaiting his inspection. His first impression was that the new Earth Security Force volunteers lacked discipline and self-control. More than half of them were looking at the airship as it descended, instead of straight ahead, as they had no doubt been instructed by the Ghatazhak instructors who paced the perimeter of the formation, barking orders.

  Commander Telles and his trusted friend, Master Sergeant Jahal, stepped out of the airship just as it touched down onto the tarmac. The airship only sat on the surface for a few seconds, just long enough for its two passengers to get clear of the ducted-rotor wash, before lifting off again.

  The commander could feel a thousand pairs of eyes on him as he approached the formation. Unlike the Ghatazhak, these men came in varying sizes, and diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds. They had come from all of the surviving nations of Earth, and to them they would all return, once their training at Porto Santo was completed.

  Commander Telles walked along the front row, scanning the faces of the volunteers of Earth. The idea that he could turn these men into anything remotely resembling a true Ghatazhak soldier was laughable. He did, however, believe that they could become a more effective security force than what most nations currently had in place.

  “This planet does have an oddly diverse mixture of humans,” Master Sergeant Jahal commented to his commander as they walked the line.

  “As do most worlds we have visited,” the commander replied. He turned away from the assembled men and moved further back, finally taking a position a few meters away and directly in front of the assembled men. He turned to face them again, pausing a moment before speaking. “I am Commander Telles of the Ghatazhak. Each of you has volunteered to help restore order to your respective nations. For that, you should be proud. Take a look at the men standing beside you. These are the only people you will truly care about from this point forward. Care about them first. Put their safety before yours, and together, you shall accomplish whatever tasks your leaders assign you.”

  Commander Telles paused, thinking back to his first days as a Ghatazhak. He had been but a teenager, with barely a whisker on his face, when he had
stood in such a formation for the first time. He remembered feeling scared. He remembered doubting himself, and his ability to survive the training he was about to embark upon. He was afraid of bringing shame to his parents, and to the family name. Most of all, he had felt the pressure that had been placed upon his young shoulders, for his successes would bring his family out of the ranks of commoners. They would never be of truly noble lineage, at least not by traditional Takaran standards, but they would be respected nonetheless. For their son would be Ghatazhak, or he would be dead.

  The commander turned to his right and began to slowly pace along parallel to the line of volunteers as he spoke. “Contrary to popular belief, the Ghatazhak are not mindless killing machines. We do not enjoy killing others. We kill to accomplish an end, whatever that end may be. It is not ours to decide what those ends are. However, it is ours to decide how best to achieve them. That, above all else, is what it means to be a Ghatazhak soldier. You shall be taught how to fight. You shall be taught how to shoot. You shall be taught how to follow orders, and you shall be taught how to work as a team. Above all else, you shall be taught how to think… and in ways you never considered. When you choose to end a life, you shall do so with reason and due consideration, knowing full well the consequences of that act… and you shall make those judgments in the blink of an eye. Any creature, big or small, can be taught how to kill. Killing is the easy part, for life is fragile… possibly the most fragile thing known. Killing with a reason is harder. Harder still, is accepting that you killed for a reason, and living with the knowledge that you have killed… again, and again, and again.”

  The commander turned around and continued to pace back in the other direction. “You are about to begin the most difficult training ever conceived. Because of this, you should be afraid. If you are not, then you are a fool, and you will discover quite soon that the Ghatazhak do not suffer fools very well. Embrace your fear, use it to motivate you. Learn to conquer it, and you will find that you have the strength of ten men, and the lethality of a hundred.”

  Commander Telles stopped in the center once more. “Your training will last ten weeks. You will end each day in a state of complete exhaustion, both physically and mentally. You will suffer more than you can possibly imagine. Commit yourselves completely, and you shall graduate. You shall not be Ghatazhak. However, you will be the second most deadly fighting force on Earth.”

  Commander Telles paused, looking over the faces of the men before him, their eyes all pointed straight ahead, just as they should be. “The fact that you have volunteered to even attempt this training is enough to gain my respect. From this point forward, I only require three things from you. First, you always give one hundred percent. Second, you always follow orders. Fail at either one of those, and you will be dropped from this program. And finally, if at any time, you feel that you are not capable of continuing to do the first two items, then be here at any sunrise to catch the outbound shuttle. Do not risk the lives of the men around you because you are too embarrassed to quit.”

  Commander Telles looked both right and left down the front row of faces. “That is all.” He turned and walked toward the master sergeant, who turned and walked beside his commander as he passed.

  “I’m betting we need more than one shuttle tomorrow morning,” Master Sergeant Jahal commented as they walked.

  “We shall see.”

  * * *

  Jessica’s eyes darted left and right as her head slowly pierced the surface of the water. Directly in front of her, perhaps a kilometer distant, was the shoreline. She could make out a few homes back from the water, and a few more further up the slope, but they were few and far between. As she had hoped, this part of the lake’s shoreline was only sparsely populated.

  She turned her head to look back over her left shoulder. She could barely make out the location where they had originally gone down, and only because there were at least a dozen boats of varying sizes trolling the area, including one larger vessel. Shuttles circled over the site, their spotlights illuminating the water below as they searched for signs of debris.

  As she had calculated, the relatively short period of time that passed between their arrival and the detonation had led the locals to believe that if the craft that crashed into their lake had been crewed, the crew undoubtedly died when their ship exploded. It would take them several days, at the least, to find cause to suspect otherwise. By then, she hoped to be long gone.

  A long look to the right revealed more and more lights along the shore and the subsequent hills, indicating that the population grew more dense further down the shoreline. She looked at the interface panel attached to her left wrist. They had been swimming for more than an hour, and at their current rate of consumption, little more than forty minutes of breathable air could be produced by their compact dive systems. Furthermore, her legs were aching from the pace they had been forced to maintain to get as much distance between them and the search parties before they ran out of air, and if she felt like she was nearing her limits, Naralena had to be as well. This location would have to suffice.

  Jessica descended again, slipping back below the surface and down a few meters. She looked at Naralena, who was waiting for her five meters down. “I think we can slip ashore here,” she told her over the underwater comms. “There are only a few houses scattered along the shore, and it’s still about a click away. We’ll move in closer and take another look to find our exit point.”

  Naralena nodded her understanding without saying a word. In fact, the only words she had spoken since Jessica had detonated the jump sub with Sergeant Weatherly trapped inside had been either ‘yes, sir’ or ‘understood.’

  Jessica expected that Naralena would be angry at her. She knew that Naralena could not dismiss the loss of a crewmate out of necessity in the same manner as she could. Naralena did not have the training. She hoped that the Volonese linguist was just dealing with it the best way she knew how. Eventually, she would speak of the incident, perhaps hurling accusations of callousness at her. That would be expected, and Jessica knew she could handle that. What she couldn’t tell Naralena was that she mourned the loss of the sergeant just as much… perhaps even more. The difference was, she couldn’t allow herself the luxury of getting all worked up over it. She had a mission to perform. She would mourn the loss of the good sergeant in her own way, once they returned to the Aurora.

  They moved along the lake bed, swimming another twenty minutes. Another peek at the surface from about three hundred meters away had revealed a pier protruding from the shore, with a half dozen small boats tied alongside. After taking a bearing, they continued along the bottom until they reached the end of the pier.

  Jessica ceased her rhythmic kicks as she passed under the end of the pier. “End of the road,” she told Naralena over the underwater comms. “We ditch the gear here and tie it to the bottom of the pilings.”

  Naralena did not respond, only began to remove her swim fins.

  Jessica did the same, looping them over her right arm. She released the buckle on her waist belt and then slipped the straps off her shoulders, swinging the small, compact, rebreather unit forward. After stringing the belt through the swim fin straps, she secured the entire unit to the bottom of one of the pilings. The mask still on her face, and still breathing from the rebreather, she turned to look at Naralena, who was securing her gear to the next piling. “You ready?”

  “Yes, sir,” Naralena responded.

  “Remember, slow and quiet.” Jessica took one last breath and then removed her mask. After closing the valve on the rebreather, she slowly ascended along the piling toward the surface.

  Jessica’s face broke the surface of the water with practiced precision, making not a ripple in the water. They were under the pier, just a few meters inland from its far end. After glancing about, she tapped Naralena, who was still submerged, on the top of her head, signaling her to surface as well. She leaned out slightly, looking overhead along the pier, both listening and l
ooking for any signs of movement. She turned back to her right, handing her gear bag to Naralena. “Hold this,” she whispered.

  Jessica moved between the edge of the pier and a small boat, working her way around the front of the boat and then back aft along the far side of the boat.

  She paused at the end of the boat, peering carefully around the stern at the pier, scanning its length back to the shore. She also scanned along the shore to the left of the pier. As best she could tell, there was no one around. The events on the lake had not yet aroused the curiosity of the few who lived in this area.

  She moved across the stern of the boat, back under the pier to rejoin Naralena. “I don’t see anyone on the pier, or the shore,” she whispered. “We should be able to walk right up onto the beach and disappear.”

  Naralena nodded her understanding as she handed Jessica’s gear bag back to her.

  Jessica moved quietly through the water from piling to piling, working her way toward the shore. Within a few minutes, her feet touched the soft bottom, and she began to walk up out of the water. Still waste deep, she paused, checking that Naralena was still close behind. She peaked out from under the edge of the pier, again scanning the small beach as well as the road higher up. She carefully checked the front of each building along the road, most of which were residences. Again, she saw no one. Despite the commotion elsewhere on the lake, the late hour had worked in their favor. This part of the lake appeared asleep.

  “There,” Jessica whispered. “Between those two buildings. The white one, and the brown one. They both look like shops, so there shouldn’t be anyone around to wake right now. We head up the beach, cross the road, and duck between them.”

  “Understood,” Naralena whispered back.

  Jessica took one last look, then stepped out from under the pier and headed up the beach at a brisk jog, staying crouched down low as she ran. She reached the edge of the beach, ducking down low along the elevated road bed. She looked right and left, then signaled Naralena to follow.

  Jessica popped her head up just enough to see over the roadway. As soon as Naralena arrived, she climbed up onto the road. “Stay with me,” she ordered in hushed tones.